Freelance Writer

Periodical Paroxysm: What’s Up With the Names of Scientific Journals?

Hello, dearly beloved. I am still very much alive–and now very much graduated. Having left Boston for the colder and Rust Belt-ier clime of Michigan, I’m currently working as a legal writer. That means I help foreign researchers get their green cards. Which means I have to examine their publication histories, which means I spend a lot of time looking at the names of scientific journals. As I do so, a few things have stood out to me.

Firstly, there are about eighty billion different journals, covering every esoteric research niche you could possibly image, and lots you couldn’t. What the hell, for example, is electroceramics?

Secondly, some of them have funny names. With that in mind, I’d like to present the first (and likely only) SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL TITLE AWARDS.

There are so many obvious one-word journal titles that I had a hard time picking. The absolute shortest title is Gut, but my personal favorite isSmall (a journal about–you guessed it–things that are small).